


Publish and/or Perish

by primeideal



Category: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion Of Your Thesis Defense (McSweeney's Post) - Luke Burns
Genre: Academia, Gen, Mathematics, Snake Portmanteaus or Snortmanteaus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:14:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27451825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/pseuds/primeideal
Summary: In order to prevent “frivolous disputations unbefitting the history of our institution” (read: “some kid getting way in over their head, dying, and us getting sued,”) you couldn’t just walk in and demand to fight a snake.
Comments: 55
Kudos: 177
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Publish and/or Perish

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SlowMercury](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SlowMercury/gifts).



> -The [snake people or sneople](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sneople) meme dates from Steven Universe and Tumblr on 2015. (The things you learn researching.)
> 
> -Content note: the paragraph near the end which starts with "The funny thing is" contains references to lockdowns/quarantines due to RL events, it can be skipped if you're not here for RL allusions.
> 
> -This is very loosely based on a true story, not only in the sense in which every artist puts a little of themselves in their work, but in the sense that some of the personalities and archetypes are drawn from RL with identifying details obscured. If any of my academic friends see themselves in this, I hope they are not too offended. No snakes were harmed in the making of this story nor my higher education.

When I was in intro calculus, I had Dr. Murphy as my professor, and Sam as my TA. Dr. Murphy had been chair of the math department for six years. My adviser and dorm-mates all said it was an honor to have her as a professor for an ordinary undergrad course—it looked good for the college to have a legend like her still deigning to teach the little people. But I wasn’t so sure. Dr. Murphy wasn’t a legend because of having clear pedagogy or even groundbreaking research; she was a legend because she’d killed her snake.

She was happy to recount the tale during office hours. How she’d still been early in the chalk presentation when one of her committee members had asked when she was going to use Definition 2. Her adviser said to wait just a moment, she’d get there when she’d get there, but the other professor said he was worried that Lemma 3 was proven in the wrong direction, B implies A instead of A implies B, and they’d better sort it out now. Dr. Murphy—“Elizabeth,” then—fumbled with her papers, which had gotten out of order. Before she could pick them back up, the snake struck.

“It was a _big_ snake,” she would gesture, “ _this_ big around. Long, too. I don’t think it was venomous, but I didn’t want to get too close. So I pulled out my chef’s knife and went at it.”

“You all carried around chef’s knifes on campus?” some wide-eyed freshman would ask.

“It was sort of a rite of passage when you advanced to candidacy, to wear one in your belt—sheathed, of course—just so you could show that you were ready. There were some stuffy deans who made a fuss when women wore them, but there’s always been nonsense like that. Anyway, my adviser hadn’t sounded very confident in the rigor of my proofs, so I thought it was better to be forearmed, and by the time I was done with it, well, there was no question that I’d passed.” She nodded at her framed diploma. “I used to have the fangs right here, but when I went on sabbatical in ‘92 they cleaned out my office and that was that.”

If there was a freshman boy he’d probably say something about “I’d kill it barehanded, just snap it in half,” and Dr. Murphy would laugh and say that he should get a little farther along before he decided whether to spend four or five or six more years in academia. To the girls, who looked very disturbed at this point, she’d say something like “but it’s different these days, advisers are much better prepared than mine was, if you go for it you probably won’t have a very dangerous one. None of my graduate students _ever_ got hurt, except the fellow who thought he could bring a firearm inside Gibson Hall. Well, security had a fine time with that one, but he passed and he’s a professor in South Carolina now.” We’d all smile, briefly honored to be in the presence of a living legend, until we had to hustle across the cold quads for our next class and realized we hadn’t actually learned anything about epsilons or deltas.

Which was why we were all so grateful for Sam, who held extra problem sessions and office hours to explain the exercises in ways we could grasp. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in adjusting to the change from high school, where anything less than ninety percent was iffy, to college, where 70% on the final might be well above average. He calmed our anxiety as much as he clarified the content.

So when Phil suggested we nominate him for TA of the year, I was happy to sign on and add a few sentences explaining how important it was to have a tireless TA like Sam paired with a professor who was a little too intimidating to ask to slow down. I forgot about it until a month later, when Dr. Murphy mentioned in class that he had actually won and we should go to the department awards ceremony to congratulate him.

The ceremony had snacks, which was the best thing about it, although I think the professors were annoyed that they couldn’t drink in front of us. Some grad students gave incomprehensible talks about their work, some administrators bragged about where seniors were going next. Finally, Dr. Murphy presented Sam a plaque.

“Thank you guys,” he said, once the pomp was over with and we’d helped ourselves to more chips. “That was sweet.”

“Thank _you_ ,” I said fervently. “You’re the one saving all our butts here.”

“That’s all you get?” said Phil. “A dinky little plaque?”

Sam laughed. “I guess in the past they used to give the honorees a fellowship and they could take the next term off TAing. Then they realized that the people who were really _good_ at TAing didn’t want to take time off, because it was the first thing they were gonna put on their resumes.”

“You deserve a break,” I said. “I mean, if you want one.”

Sam glanced back and forth, as if making sure his adviser wasn’t listening. “I don’t know if I’m going to finish the PhD. There are lots of good jobs I can get with just a masters’, and...I like teaching more than research anyway.”

“Well, good luck with whatever,” said Phil.

“Thanks.” Then he rushed on, “It’s not because I’m allergic, I mean, not _just_ that...”

“Allergic to what?” I asked. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Lots of things. Bee stings, for sure. The doctors think I’m at higher risk if I get a venomous snake, and it’s like, do I really want to risk that for the small chance of a tenure-track position?”

“Oh, come on, dude,” said one of Sam’s grad student friends. “Those are just an exaggeration. It’s like the fancy robes, you don’t _have_ to get one, it’s just for the symbolism.”

“Uh-huh,” said Sam. “Let me know when you actually schedule a defense, then we’ll talk.”

Phil and I took this as a cue to leave. Grad students were their own subspecies every bit as esoteric as rare snakes, and we didn’t need to intrude any further.

* * *

In retrospect, my reasons for applying to grad school myself weren’t particularly high-minded. I didn’t know what to do in the real world, and I figured I’d never be more prepared than I was then. If I barely retained the definition of a closed topological space a week after the final, how would I handle a year or two off?

Once I got there, it was my own stubbornness that pulled me through as much as anything else. For someone trying to make a career out of analytical, rigorous thinking, I’m as vulnerable as anyone else to the sunk-cost fallacy.

And maybe it sounds cheesy, but one of the best things about it was the people. Turns out that when you draw from all around the world to find a bunch of bright, self-motivated young people who are turned on by the prospect of spending hours and years staring at a bunch of abstract concepts, and don’t let the fear of rejection or failure or snakes hold them back, you can find some really cool nerds.

On the other hand, almost all of them were dudes. Fine for playing board games or rock climbing or cramming for the algebra qual: slightly more awkward for finding roommates. My first year I shared an apartment with a poli sci student named Brittany. We didn’t really cross paths much, because she was almost never in the kitchen or living room. When she wasn’t on campus, she was usually watching reality TV, arguing on the internet about reality TV, or cruising bars in the hopes of crossing paths with a reality TV caster. Amazingly, this worked out, because just a couple weeks before we were supposed to start our second year she told me that nope, she had to go prepare to camp out on an abandoned desert island or something, and I was on my own.

Most of the people still looking on Craigslist at that point seemed kind of flaky—kicked out of their boyfriend’s place, just back from living in an RV, fought with previous landlord over pet policy. I wound up going with Yuqin sight unseen because “spent the summer in Singapore with my family” was the least weird excuse.

Luckily, Yuqin was a total sweetheart. When she wasn’t making posters about how babies learn sign language, she was usually baking, and happy to offer me leftover cookie dough. The only downside was her boyfriend—Drew, another linguistics student.

“Obviously language acquisition is an exciting area,” he would say, while I was grading homework on the couch, “but I think we can learn much more about society by researching subcultures’ morpheme patterns, and I find the autoethnographic approach very insightful.”

Several students hadn’t even attempted the related rates problems, which at least made my job quick. I gave them 6/10 for completion while wondering how someone who used the word “autoethnographic” on a regular basis had landed a second date.

“I find it fascinating when a children’s cartoon expresses the subconscious anxieties of young adults,” he continued.

“Yuqin,” I said, “are you dating a brony?”

Yuqin pulled her headphones out of her ears—I must have interrupted her in the middle of some phonetics project. “What?”

“Never mind.”

“The radical spread of so-called internet memes not only represents how thoroughly Dawkins’ metaphors have penetrated youth culture, but reflects the human capacity for self-awareness in language play. Even my colleagues are concerned about their snefense, or snake defense.”

“We are not,” said Yuqin, who seemed to have mastered the ability to listen to him even through the headphones. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign. “I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t math students worry about becoming snake failures, or snailures?”

“Right now we’re worried about funding for next year,” I noted. “The fifth-years want me to sign their petition for some union thing.”

“Do you have a lot of students beyond the fifth year?”

“There’s...a few? I don’t know everyone, it’s a big department.”

“Humanities students tend to take longer than the physical sciences. So for people who make it through a seven- or eight-year grind, the burden is especially high even if they don’t have a strong thesis. You don’t want to face the humiliation of being a snake dropout, or snopout.”

“Leave Allison be,” said Yuqin, without looking up, “she has papers to grade.”

I gratefully headed back to my room, red pen in tow.

* * *

People used to say that choosing an adviser was kind of like proposing—there’s a lot of buildup, you don’t want to get rejected and make things awkward, and you’re going to be stuck together for several years at least. I would say it’s more like joining a religion; at first you just read some obscure texts once in a while because people say it’s a good idea, and then everyone starts assuming “so, did you choose one yet?” and then you say “I didn’t really choose, it just happened.” And then hopefully most people leave you alone, unless they’re the department secretary and say “surprise! You need to pick an adviser now.” Also like religions, they do a lot of fighting over sacred ground, in this case offices with natural light.

Anyway, that was how I drifted into being Omesh’s student—first a reading course, then TAing for his undergrad algebra course, and one thing led to another. From what I saw of him in the undergrad class, he was extremely organized and methodical, and I figured that was a good sign. The fact that he was still willing and able to teach undergrads was also a small plus that he wouldn’t be too unapproachable—although, as I’d learned with Dr. Murphy, nothing is certain. And yes, he had an expansive seventh-floor office that was much brighter than the grim cubicles some grad students got. Once I figured out how to navigate around the piles of new books that editors sent him to promote, and that he invariably never got around to reading never mind writing a blurb for, it was a very nice place to work.

Another metaphor people throw around sometimes is that your adviser is kind of like your _parent_ , in the sense that you can figure out who your grand-adviser was and then trace your ancestry going back to Euler or someone. By the same logic, your advisers’ other students are your academic brothers and sisters—occasionally you fight for dad’s attention, but mostly you’re there to help mentor and support each other. If I needed to format a fancy equation in a PDF, and Omesh’s older student David was hanging around the department, asking him was usually faster than Google.

So when David invited me to his defense, I felt like I had to accept. For one, there were only a few people even in the math department who would understand what he was talking about. He hadn’t invited his parents, either, even though they only lived a couple states away. “They can come for graduation,” he would say, shrugging with one shoulder. “Assuming, uh. It all goes well.”

Was it some kind of superstition, to never talk about the possibility that something might go wrong? Or maybe it was assuming things would go well that jinxed you, and you had to wait until it was set in stone to make travel plans?

There were maybe a dozen of us in the conference room, mostly students and faculty I recognized from the topology seminars. One of David’s committee members I didn’t know at all, and I wasn’t sure he was even a math professor. Some of the other departments had a rule where one of your committee members had to be from outside your department, and we dreaded the possibility that math might force us to do the same thing. Sure, there were probably Russian literature professors sitting in on religious studies defenses, or vice versa, but who was going to care about very theoretical topology? I figured if worst came to worst, I would volunteer Omesh for Yuqin’s committee and ask her if she was willing to return the favor.

David looked calm for the circumstances. The only thing that seemed out of place was that he had a whole lot of chalk at the blackboard. Was he planning on writing all the important lemmas by hand? Sure, the committee members had all read the thesis—I hoped—but the rest of us could be here for a long time. Instead, he just turned on the projector and launched into a slideshow. Okay, maybe the chalk was a backup plan if a snake ate the extension cord.

We made it through the talk without incident. So maybe I glazed over a bit in the generalizations to _N_ dimensions, whatever. I’d seen a lot of the background in his seminar talks.

“Are there any questions?” he asked.

Professor Ignatiev cleared his throat. “In section four you mention—”

A flash of movement, behind my chair.

If you, or your TA, have ever tried to write with a piece of chalk fresh from the box, you know it makes a terrible squeaking noise. We get into the habit of snapping chalk so there are two rough ends and writing with those. When David did that, I thought he was just going to sketch another diagram, one of those things contrasting a donut with a two-hole donut. Instead, he smeared both pieces of chalk on his hands.

Then he lunged for the snake that was idling along the windows. It wasn’t an enormous snake—Omesh had helped him prepare well—but it was fairly thick around. David didn’t seem to notice; he just grabbed it by the neck and twisted, and it stopped moving. It was over in seconds, less time than it took to write out a precise definition. I felt like I should applaud, but nobody else was, so I stopped after a few awkward claps.

“In section four,” Ignatiev repeated, “you mention the homotopy groups of this special case. Does that generalize to the conjecture of Thibault and Moulin?”

“Nooo,” said Professor Sorensen, before David could reply. “Moulin’s conjecture only applies when you have a map from some power of **C**.”

“But we do have such a map,” said Ignatiev. “Albeit not everywhere continuous, but—”

David cleared his throat as if to say _Excuse me?_ I’m _the one defending, and also the one who killed the snake here._ “From what I understand, Moulin’s work is following the Grothendieck approach more closely, whereas this formulation is more inductive. I think that is one direction for further research, although I’m more interested on generalizing the proofs in section six, maybe we could weaken the convexity assumptions.”

Omesh nodded politely.

“Any other questions?”

Nothing.

“All right, well, thank you very much, David,” said Omesh. “If the rest of you could just step outside for a moment...”

Another archaic ritual, as if Omesh would have let him schedule the defense without being sure he would pass. We pushed in our chairs and stepped out into the hall, trying to act like we weren’t impressed by the dead snake.

“That was _amazing_!” I said, once the door was closed behind us.

David gave one of those awkward half-shrugs, but he was smiling. How long had it been since he had really relaxed? “I figured it’s like rock climbing. You have to have a strong grip.”

Some of my climbing nerd friends described finding places to grasp the wall as “solving a puzzle,” but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what they meant. But whatever worked, I figured. “That’s awesome. I should try sometime.”

“You should,” he said, and started rambling about gyms he’d been to as if he hadn’t just killed a snake.

Of course, it only took a few minutes for the committee to emerge. “Congratulations, Dr. Seward,” said Omesh, grinning broadly. “Well done.”

Then we all went back to the department lounge—undergrads weren’t allowed, so we could toast David’s success.

* * *

The university counselors weren’t _bad_ , exactly, just unhelpful. They all started with the same mandatory screening questions about whether I was at risk of hurting myself or others (I was not) and then did the usual overview. What was my family history? Was I getting enough sleep? Was I afraid of snakes?

“It’s more of an impostor syndrome thing,” I said. “Like, in undergrad I would freak out about my finals. But then I passed them. So people ask ‘why can’t you remember that experience and feel confident’? Well, my anxiety is telling me, _that was easy, but_ this _will be hard._ Like as soon as I complete something, it doesn’t count.”

They would nod thoughtfully. “It sounds like you’re worried about the thesis.”

“I’m not even that far along yet!” I would protest. “And like—is the work I’m doing ever going to _matter_? I want to find something that makes me fulfilled, but I feel like I need to shoulder all the problems in the news myself, somehow, without burning out.”

Then they’d mention that on special occasions like alumni weekend they open places like the faculty club and the observatory and the serpentarium for tours, and it would be possible for me to go and look at snakes in a safe environment and overcome my fears. I would thank them politely and check the time.

Omesh, I knew, had done a postdoc with Dan Katz in New York many years ago. Katz was one of those guys who had co-published with everyone of a certain age, so it wasn’t that impressive to be two degrees of separation from him. But in my fourth year, their papers got an award from the topologists’ association (yes, we have one), and all of a sudden Omesh was travelling everywhere, giving talks and going on sabbaticals. So instead of meeting with him once a week, I would remind him that he needed to find a time to video conference when we were both awake in our respective time zones.

The candidacy talk was somewhat of a formality. I’d put together a committee and found a week when Omesh was actually on campus. Professor Sorensen was as chatty as he’d been at David’s defense, and Professor Bradman, who liked to criticize the administrative policies when he got to seminar early, was similarly effusive. When I got to the room and found them making quips about Soviet-era research programs, I couldn’t help but relax.

So that made me a “candidate;” the registrars’ office had some issues processing that and I got about five e-mails making sure it was correct before I got them to stop. Officially, I was just one very long paper, presentation, and snake wrangle away from being Dr. Clement. Unofficially, nothing had changed. I still scheduled office hours in the ugly cubicles, still took turns reading papers in seminar, still hoped Omesh would come up with some insights deeper than “should this be section 2.3 or 2.2.4?”

But if I was anxious, some of my friends had it even worse. Niko and Abby’s adviser accepted a job in Australia, so they both had to find new advisers. Wesley took a quarter off to deal with health issues, and then that turned into another quarter, and then a year. Min Lan had visa trouble, so she basically moved into the computer lab to finish in winter quarter, and even then it was a rush job. It sounded like she had a fairly large snake to grapple with, but she blinded it with her laser pointer and then it was harmless.

Min Lan’s adviser, Dr. Kita, was one of those guys who always had four or five students at a time plus a postdoc or two. So there was speculation that he’d deliberately gone easy on her to make sure she finished and could graduate. “That’s not even possible,” he pointed out, “I don’t pick the snake, I just gave an honest assessment of the thesis to the kustos.” And _that_ led to an investigation of his academic integrity, which meant that Seong Jin and his other students wanted to find a different adviser too…

Wesley texted me out of the blue, after a year, mentioning that he was going to be in town and wanted a place to stay for a few days. Of course I accepted eagerly, hugging him and pretending he and Yuqin remembered each other even though they probably didn’t. “Board game nights aren’t the same without you,” I said. “Dominion isn’t fun with first-years who can’t shuffle.”

He forced a laugh, but seemed uncomfortable. In _our_ first year, Wesley had been one of the guys always raising his hand and making sure the professor saw he knew the answer. What had happened to us?

I itched to know if he had a job, was healthy, was happy, but tried to avoid broaching the issue of what, after so long, had brought him here. We circled around it until he mentioned, offhand, “I just need a meeting with the administrators. To convince them I’m for real.”

“Of course you’re for real.”

“That I’m, uh. Ready to defend.”

“That’s great!” I said. “Were you and Bradman collaborating when you were, uh, back home?”

“Well, not really. I mean, we have that one paper from the conference in California, but that’s not really a thesis.” I let him continue; one paper from a conference was more than I had. “But I figured...what’s the worst they can do to me, one of those big monster snakes? Fine, what do I have to lose?”

I couldn’t tell whether this was confidence or fatalism, but in either case, “publish or perish” had taken on another dimension.

As it happened, the graduate division was used to these kinds of conversations. In order to prevent “frivolous disputations unbefitting the history of our institution” (read: “some kid getting way in over their head, dying, and us getting sued,”) you couldn’t just walk in and demand to fight a snake. Wesley would have to establish residency and candidacy all over again, and I knew he’d rather return to the stress of a tech start-up than do that.

Even if he sounded disappointed, I couldn’t be, not completely. It might have saved his life.

* * *

Niko and Abby had spent a lot of time together when they were both in Dr. Rodriguez’ biomath lab. Then he left for Australia, they found new advisers so they were no longer “academic siblings,” and somehow they managed to spend even _more_ time together.

Then they got married.

“Uh,” I said. “Congratulations?”

Either Abby didn’t notice my stupor and loss for words, or she accepted it as a normal symptom of being a sixth-year. “It wasn’t a big deal or anything. We just wanted it to be formal for visas and stuff. We’re not sure where we’re gonna live after graduating.”

“Wherever we can find jobs,” said Niko. “Two-body problem, you know.”

My familiarity with dating within one’s department was mostly, well, academic, but I nodded. “As long as you’re confident you _will_ finish.”

“Course I’ll finish,” said Abby. “William needs me out of here one way or the other so he can redirect my grant money.”

I couldn’t help but press on. “What if something goes wrong?”

“What if it does?” Niko shrugged. “At least we’re officially next-of-kin.”

“Oh yeah, because we have so much savings on a grad student salary,” said Abby.

“My Magic cards would net you something.”

I left the lovebirds to it. Maybe I was just using the threat of snakes as a—what would the counselors call it?—a defense mechanism. If I was still a student, still going to classes and daydreaming about shapes like I’d done most of my life, I didn’t have to start real life yet.

Omesh did not make this easier by casually announcing that he was going to another “seminar” that lasted a month or two. “How many years do you think this is going to take?” I asked, half-nervous and half-flippant. Mostly I was worried what would happen once the math department gave up on me and stopped offering me TA positions. Could I moonlight in the philosophy department as a side hustle?

“Epsilon, less than one,” said Omesh. Math humor. “You should be able to finish this spring, even if I’m not here.”

“Really?” I blurted. “I mean, what about the defense?”

“It’s a formality,” he said. “The committee can sign off from wherever.”

“And the snake fight?”

“Well, _we_ don’t have to be present in person for it,” Omesh said far too cheerfully. “You can meet the kustos in a conference room once you’ve verified all our signatures.”

Verifying all the committee’s signatures turned out to be harder than it sounded. I wanted to wait till the last minute to get the thesis in as good a shape as possible, of course, and to try to feel like it was really _my_ work and not Omesh’s breakthroughs with my name on it. I’d been e-mailing the committee with every update, and took their lack of criticism as approval. But when the time came to actually get them to upload their virtual signature to the registrar’s office, Professor Bradman was at a conference in England, and on top of the time difference, his internet connection was bad, so he had to log in on his phone and approve it in the nick of time.

Still, he managed. And then all that was left between me and the doctorate was an encounter with a snake.

“Yuqin,” I said, “I need a favor.”

* * *

There’s an old joke that goes like: a topologist is someone who can’t tell the difference between a donut and a coffee cup. See, as long as they have one loop in them, you can gently smush them into each other like you were playing with Play-Doh. In regular geometry, you’d be changing the volume or the surface area or the angles, and that might be cause for concern, but topologists don’t care as long as you’re not slicing the donut in half.

Another old saying goes: you should always make sure you have snacks at your defense. Committee members who are anticipating a party might be that much more likely to pass you, and if things go wrong, at least you can gorge yourself alone and don’t have to share.

Well, the committee wasn’t going to be present, but something was. In true topologist style, I’d borrowed Yuqin’s Bundt cake pan and made a “one-hole torus” coffee cake, bringing the dirty pan and extra plate I’d used for flipping it up to campus. The conference room was down the hall from Omesh’s office.

The kustos was in her element, dressed in a lab coat and holding a clipboard professionally. Ten months out of the year, she was anonymous, working in the serpentarium and supervising the most daring—or stupid—work-study programs. Come spring, she might have been the campus president. Everyone gave her plenty of room.

The snake was draped over the back of a spinny office chair. It looked smaller than David’s. Carefully, I set the paper plate containing the Bundt cake down on the table. It slithered around the outside, curious, and finally made a loop in the “short” direction. Two loops. That was tangled enough, I hoped. Grabbing the heavy plates, I clapped them together, smushing the cake and snake together, and hurled them out the window—which, just like Omesh’s office, was up on the seventh floor.

The kustos barely cracked a smile, but then, I guess she’d seen it all. “If you could just sign here...”

What, did she think I’d hired a ringer or something, like I was cheating on the SAT? I didn’t complain. Scribbling my signature was something I knew how to do.

And that was it. I haven’t thought about it much since; maybe it’s another one of those impostor syndrome things, where once it’s out of the way, it seems as if it was nothing. Part of me wonders if the rest of the committee even read the final draft. From people I’ve talked to, I get the sense that science professors aren’t particularly sadistic. I’m supposed to be their future colleague and collaborator. Omesh had spent years helping me prove theorems and write the paper, and if we got published in a journal, it would be a joint effort. It wouldn’t really look good for _him_ if I’d been poisoned by then. Maybe humanities professors are more eager to murder underlings who disagree with their theories or believe the whole enterprise is just meaningless garbage. Or those students get paid less and take longer to finish, so you really have to scare away anyone who’s on the fence and accept only the most dedicated masochists.

The funny thing is, I felt a little disappointed when I realized my committee wouldn’t be there in person, like I’d missed out on some great rite of passage. But it turned out I was a trailblazer. Because when the quarantines and the lockdowns went into effect, suddenly everyone was trying to learn how to video conference and work virtually, presenting their papers remotely and only then showing up to campus, where a kustos in full PPE would unleash a snake on them. I was just ahead of the curve.

And now? I was happy to leave academia. I don’t really want abstruse theoretical questions lingering even when I’m supposed to be off the clock, and I definitely don’t want to work at a research university where I have to come up with appropriately-difficult thesis problems and/or snakes to challenge some other young grad student. I work for a government contractor where we’re supposed to manufacture airplanes and rocket exteriors, but we really spend most of our time watching the computer kernels overload and rebooting them. The hardest part of the interview was convincing _them_ that I wasn’t there to prove theorems.

“You studied...math?” one of the interviewers asked me, as if he was scared of having to ask about “homology” or “manifolds.” “Does this have any practical applications?”

“My research? No,” I said. “But I’m a fast learner and can pick up quantitative skills quickly.”

He nodded. “Can you program?”

“I didn’t for my paper,” I admitted. Then I smiled. “However, I _would_ say I’m an expert in Python.”


End file.
